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Extra funding bound for city traffic issues
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Traffic woes for some Richmond Hill residents may soon be quelled thanks to efforts from city and county officials.
At the Richmond Hill City Council regular meeting Tuesday, Mayor Harold Fowler said recent meetings with Georgia Department of Transportation Commissioner Keith Golden led to some increases in funding for traffic lights and improvement projects in the city.
Fowler said he, along with Bryan County Commission Chairman Jimmy Burnsed, Commissioner Carter Infinger and County Administrator Phil Jones, met with Golden in Atlanta about the resurfacing of Timber Trail Road and installing traffic lights at Highway 144 and Timber Trail and at Highway 17 and Mulberry Drive.
He said discussions of the Timber Trail resurfacing project originally came up about two years ago and the DOT promised $45,000 towards the project, but it never progressed. He said DOT has still agreed to commit that and more to the project.
“In that meeting, they agreed they would still give us $45,000, and they had a couple of contracts come in lower than they had estimated. So they have kicked in an additional $40,000,” Fowler said.
He said county officials also explained to Golden that once Harris Trail Road is paved and the widening of Highway 144 begins, Timber Trail would be impacted. This led DOT to provide assistance with the installation of that traffic light.
“They will furnish a traffic light and maybe some other paraphernalia, but the rest of the cost of installing that light would be shared equally by the city and county if council so agrees and county commissioners agree,” Fowler said.
The traffic light at the intersection of Highway 17 and Mulberry Drive was also addressed during the meeting with Golden, Fowler said.
“I thought the city would get about $50,000 next year, and they’d already told us we could use that towards applying to that light,” Fowler said. “But the commissioner (Golden) told me that we were going to get $100,000.”
With the funds from the DOT and the $25,000 committed from TRC-Richmond Hill, who has proposed a Family Dollar store at that intersection, the cost of the light should be covered, he said.
“There is a good chance that by the end of this year we should have traffic lights at Mulberry, Timber Trail and the resurfacing done,” he said. “So it was a very great meeting we had.”
Read more in the May 19 edition of the News.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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